training – Gigaomhttp://gigaom.com
The industry leader in emerging technology researchWed, 21 Feb 2018 21:16:20 +0000en-UShourly1As Good As It Gets?http://gigaom.com/2016/02/14/as-good-as-it-gets/
http://gigaom.com/2016/02/14/as-good-as-it-gets/#commentsSun, 14 Feb 2016 17:03:44 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=949633Putting the burden of retraining in a digital world on the backs of the workers may be as ‘enlightened’ a policy as we’ll see, in the postnormal economy.

Reading a piece on AT&T’s CEO, Randall Stephenson, and his plans to retool the company for an accelerating and vastly different world, one in which his company will be competing with Google and Amazon, not just traditional phone companies. And to get there, the company will have to retrain — or replace — many of its 280,000 workers.

But today’s businesses are not going to take on the burdens of such a massive training effort: they will instead expect workers to dig their own hole and sharpen their own shovel, as I put it. Before anyone can get reengaged with their job, they have to get reengaged with their work, on a personal level. As I wrote,

This is where a truce has to be called and each individual commits to personal program of engagement in what they consider their calling, which may only obliquely line up with the job that the company has that person doing. This involves reading, reflection, discussions with other like-minded people, and sharing and growing those thoughts in groups, offline and online. My expression for this investment, where the individual reengages with their own work, in a sense independently of the company (or companies) they may be working for, is this: Dig your own hole, sharpen your own shovel.

And this will involve time. Each person will have to carve out time for this engagement: it won’t just happen.

In an ambitious corporate education program that started about two years ago, he is offering to pay for classes (at least some of them) to help employees modernize their skills. But there’s a catch: They have to take these classes on their own time and sometimes pay for them with their own money.

To Mr. Stephenson, it should be an easy choice for most workers: Learn new skills or find your career choices are very limited.

“There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop,” he said in a recent interview at AT&T’s Dallas headquarters. People who do not spend five to 10 hours a week in online learning, he added, “will obsolete themselves with the technology.”

[…]

Companies’ reinventing themselves to compete with more nimble competitors is hardly a new story. Many have tried, and a handful have even succeeded. Mr. Stephenson wants AT&T to be among those few.

In the last three years, he has spent more than $20 billion annually, primarily on building the digital business. DirecTV was acquired in a $63 billion deal last year, and several billion more was spent to buy wireless businesses in Mexico and the United States. Even for a company with $147 billion in 2015 revenue and over $400 billion in assets built up over more than a century, it’s a lot.

That can’t happen unless at least some of his work force is retrained to deal with the technology. It’s not a young group: The average tenure at AT&T is 12 years, or 22 years if you don’t count the people working in call centers. And many employees don’t have experience writing open-source software or casually analyzing terabytes of customer data.

If you don’t develop the new skills, you won’t be fired — at least AT&T won’t say as much — but you won’t have much of a future. The company isn’t too worried about people leaving, since executives estimate that eventually AT&T could get by with one-third fewer workers.

Mr. Stephenson declined to project how many workers he might have by 2020, when the cloud-based system is supposed to be fully in place. One thing about cutting people in an aging work force, he noted, is that “demography is on our side.” Other senior executives say shrinking the work force by 30 percent is not out of the question.

AT&T’s Vision2020 program for employee education is based on workers giving up time on nights and weekends — uncompensated — but with the company reimbursing the cost of courses up to $8000/year.

My bet is that this is the new basis for strategic commitment to an educated workforce: the company will pay the out-of-pocket costs, but the worker still has to hold down a full-time (or more than full-time) job, and to dedicate serious amounts of ‘leisure’ time to coursework, time that normally would be spent on outside interests, family, or moonlighting. Depending on your perspective, this looks like a fair deal, an additional encroachment of work into the personal time of workers, or just the way things are, now.

And this might be the best deal workers can get, in an economic climate of endemic recessionary philosophy mixed with the threat of becoming obsolete in a marketplace driven by high technology, and being hollowed out by automation, AI and algorithms, and free-trade outsourcing of work abroad.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2016/02/14/as-good-as-it-gets/feed/4Axonify aims to shake up employee training with micro learning & gamificationhttp://gigaom.com/2015/11/17/axonify-aims-to-shake-up-employee-training-with-micro-learning-gamification/
Tue, 17 Nov 2015 13:00:02 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=920735Employee training is usually a profoundly unhelpful whirlwind. It’s a day or two stuffed full of information, most of which gets partially (if not completely) forgotten by the second or third week of the #grind.

It’s not that employers don’t try. I’m sure they do their level-best to make training helpful. After all, training and on-boarding employees is expensive, and high turnover rates and under-utilized employees are bad for business. But employee training is still begging for disruption. That’s exactly what Axonify aims to do.

More than just an employee training platform, clould-based software Axonify aims to be an employee knowledge system that’s available for teaching, reference tracking and improvement every day that an employee’s on the job. Using adaptive and micro learning principles, paired with ramification and on-demand knowledge centers, Axonify’s employee knowledge platform is a serious departure from the training systems that are in place at most companies today.

“Axonify’s approach was born of the simple realization that human beings aren’t capable of effectively acquiring large volumes of knowledge in one long event,” says Carol Leaman, CEO of Axonify. “Attention spans are short and getting shorter. We’re stressed and distracted. We also have very individual and specific information needs.”

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that we’re not great a focusing. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and a hundred other sources of #content demand our attention hourly. And it doesn’t help that we check our email on average 77 times per day. We’re bombarded by information constantly, and when it’s more than a few sentences, we’re not great at filing it away for future use.

“Our brains are really good at digesting 4 to 5 new pieces of information at a time and moving them from short to long-term memory,” says Leaman. “It turns out we’re easily overwhelmed, and too much content literally goes ‘in one ear and out the other’. It also turns out that in order to hone that knowledge, we need to actively recall the information periodically over 30 – 45 days.”

That’s where the micro learning aspect of Axonify comes in. Information specific to an employees position within a company is doled out in small, digestible segments. Sessions don’t last hours, but minutes, and gamifies the learning process with points and leader boards.

“Employees spend about 3 to 5 minutes per day on the platform receiving content in a micro learning format,” says Leaman. “Through understanding leading edge brain-based research in the areas of memory and retention, we designed the experience to create the most optimal scenario for knowledge acquisition that delivers targeted information, person by person, based on what they know, or don’t know, every single day. The proprietary algorithm we’ve developed allows us to personalize learning according to individual needs, strengths and weaknesses.”

Employees voluntarily engaging with content that makes them better at their jobs is a powerful thing. But what kind of knowledge and content are we talking about?

Right now, Axonify’s being used by companies like Walmart, Toyota, Bloomingdale’s and John Hancock. All wildly different companies in vastly different industries. Customer service, sales and product knowledge are obvious bets for the Axonify platform, but a vital piece of the employee knowledge is one that companies can’t afford to overlook: safety.

“Walmart is using Axonify across its more than 75,000 distribution centre associates to keep them safe on the job,” says Leaman. “OSHA reportable incidents dropped by 54% in the first six months. The amount of money saved was incredible.”

Axonify goes a bit further than just training, though. Understanding that question don’t always crop up at convenient times and aren’t always answered by bite-sized morsels of information, Axonify is rolling out Discovery Zone, which provides easily-accessible reference material.

“It’s a place where employees can easily find whatever they need to do their jobs in 2 clicks and 10 seconds,” says Leaman. “With so much information in most corporate archives, employees can’t find anything quickly. They need to have information at their fingertips, on-demand, instantly.”

Shaking up the way that employers and employees interact as they circle around important on-the-job information is a tall order, to be sure. Companies, particularly large ones, are notoriously slow to adopt new technology. That said, with large companies already on board, there’s an obvious benefit to shirking the old training system and plugging into the next generation of delivering employee knowledge.

“Employees feel the intrinsic benefit of being smarter, and they appreciate being given the opportunity to learn constantly, quickly, specifically and when they have a few spare minutes,” says Leaman. “All this translates into higher employee engagement that benefits the business as a whole.”

]]>‘YourTrainer’ app wants to help you work out smarter, not harderhttp://gigaom.com/2015/10/26/your-trainer-app-wants-to-help-you-work-out-smarter-not-harder/
http://gigaom.com/2015/10/26/your-trainer-app-wants-to-help-you-work-out-smarter-not-harder/#commentsMon, 26 Oct 2015 17:55:09 +0000https://gigaom.com/?p=920585Working out is hard. And most of the time, it sucks. Like all things that suck, though, tech is trying to making working out better. It’ll likely be awhile before our devices can work out for us, but in the meantime, there are a few companies trying to help folks work out on their own terms. Enter Your Trainer: the startup behind the app of the same name that employs user feedback to generate a personalized exercising regimen.

We all work long hours, put in overtime, drink too much coffee, get too little sleep, and have Netflix queues that overfloweth. We buy gym memberships, go regularly for three weeks, make excuses and then cancel over the phone in shame two months later. It’s fine, it happens to the best of us. Maybe it’s because actually going to the gym is a big enough pain in the ass that we’re willing to bail. Maybe it’s because we don’t have anyone keeping us honest. Maybe it’s just because we have no real idea how to work out effectively. Normally, this is where a personal trainer comes in.

Personal trainers are great. Really. If they’re qualified and mostly decent human being-wise and care about helping you reach your goals, they can be a huge asset in the fitness game. But they’re also really expensive. According to the National Strength and Conditioning Association, personal trainers run an average rate of about $50/hour. For those of us ballin’ on a budget, that lands us pretty much right back where we started: on the couch.

Don’t get too comfortable just yet though — there might be a better way to work out.

At first glance, Your Trainer might seem remarkably similar to DailyBurn or any of the other dozens video fitness apps available. But where Your Trainer differs from the DailyBurns of the world is the ability to tailor workouts to you body, goals, and preferences and to adjust those workouts in realtime. You get a series of short training videos that changes based on your feedback and needs.

“What we set out to do was leverage technology, exercise science, and behavioral psychology to provide all of the benefits of a personal trainer,” says Your Trainer CEO and founder Larry Cotter.

It works like this: Your Trainer features over 3,000 short 3-minute videos with a variety of personal trainers. These videos are strung together to create workout streams that are personalized, based on the information you give the app about yourself (height, weight, age, goals, injuries, obstacles) and your preferences (I hate burpees but love Russian Twists*).

Cotter calls these videos “the periodic table of exercise elements.” From this massive library of fitness videos, YourTrainer’s learning algorithm (which we’ll get to in a moment) draws up a workout stream that’s built for you.

Which brings us to why, exactly, this app is called Your Trainer. Like a personal trainer, the app has information about you and uses it to find effective exercise elements to put you to work. Your Trainer also provides you with the closest digital equivalent of turning to your personal trainer and saying, “If you ever make me do that again, I swear I will never work out again.”

“We provide you with these interactive controls,” says Cotter. “Say something hurts your ankle — well, you can ‘dislike’ it and say it hurts. Then we know to skip that immediately and learn from that, so the next time through, you’re not going to get that exercise, or other things that are hurting your ankle.”

Your Trainer comes in three pricing tiers: Weekly ($6.99 per week), Monthly ($9.99 per month) and Yearly ($99.99 per year) for unlimited workouts.

The goal? Cotter says that Your Trainer is looking to demystify process of getting fit. “What we want to do is remove the guesswork out of the exercise routine.”

*Obviously not true–no one loves Russian Twists.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2015/10/26/your-trainer-app-wants-to-help-you-work-out-smarter-not-harder/feed/2Working out while wearing Oculus Rift could soon be a thinghttp://gigaom.com/2014/12/15/working-out-while-wearing-oculus-rift-could-soon-be-a-thing/
http://gigaom.com/2014/12/15/working-out-while-wearing-oculus-rift-could-soon-be-a-thing/#commentsMon, 15 Dec 2014 22:45:55 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=900538I was at the gym the other day thinking about how fun virtual reality would be on a treadmill. My gym’s treadmills have screens, and you can pull up videos of different runs around the world. There are trails leading through forests and up the sides of volcanoes. It’s pretty fun for the three minutes before I remember I can turn on “Cupcake Wars.”

But what if that run was available in true virtual reality? With a headset on, you could look around or even choose between two different paths. It would feel more like actual virtual tourism than staring at a screen on a treadmill.

Virtual reality probably isn’t coming to a treadmill near you anytime soon (I can barely walk while wearing a headset, let alone run), but it is being looked at for other types of working out. Runtastic, which makes an exercise app, released a 7-minute workout for Oculus Rift today. A virtual trainer leads you through different exercises, which are tracked and then reported back to you.

It’s just a proof of concept at this point, as Rift isn’t widely available yet. The headset is also a bit bulky, and its foam face cushion collects sweat like crazy. If you’ve ever worn ski goggles you know the sensation: a clammy moistness that makes you hesitant to lend the goggles to anyone else ever again. It’s a bit disgusting.

But like skiing down a mountain, virtual reality is immersive enough that it has a way of making you disregard minor discomforts. That’s pretty fantastic for exercising; who doesn’t want to forget about the burn in their abs?

Runtastic’s app also hints at virtual reality’s social potential. I like the idea of the yoga classes at my gym, but that means traveling there two extra days a week. Instead, I could join a class in virtual reality. There’s still the social pressure to attend and an expert to critique my form, but I never have to leave my living room.

Virtual reality headsets will, of course, get better. They will get lighter and sleeker. Maybe someday they’ll look like swim goggles, getting rid of that sweaty foam feeling altogether. What’s not in question is that virtual reality can make working out more fun.

Now, who is up for some virtual jazzercise?

]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/12/15/working-out-while-wearing-oculus-rift-could-soon-be-a-thing/feed/1Bringing the whole IT team into the cloud generationhttp://gigaom.com/2014/02/14/bringing-the-whole-it-team-into-the-cloud-generation/
Fri, 14 Feb 2014 18:32:31 +0000http://research.gigaom.com/?p=218382Gigaom Research curator for cloud, David Linthicum, takes a look at what IT departments can and should do to bring the cloud skeptics in their midst into the new generation: When should you start firing the “cloud blockers?”

IT departments are “the biggest hindrance to corporate growth”, and they need to learn from the “shadow IT” workaround of other divisions bringing SaaS solutions in directly. That’s what David Linthicum, the curator of Gigaom Research’s cloud coverage, sees in his role as an SVP at Cloud Technology Partners, a cloud consulting and implementation firm.

In his view, IT departments on one hand get in trouble by violating IT principles in their approach to the cloud. But on the other hand their lack of responsiveness is the cause for line-of-business managers bringing in SaaS products in a way that may violate the compliance, security and integration requirements of the organization.Too often, firms know what they want and need to meet customer demand, but IT is too slow in delivering on it.

Cloud computing is the technology that enables companies to break that cycle, but it takes great skill to leverage the agility of cloud solutions within increasingly complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

IT department mistakes with cloud

Among the mistakes David sees IT departments make with cloud are

Bypassing traditional prototype and pilot approaches, with the resulting data points factored into ROI projections—and thus ending up with unworkable solutions by the time they call in external assistance, and

Not factoring in the dynamics and cost of staffing with the skill set needed to manage a cloud environment.

Sticker shock

The cost and difficulty of staffing with the needed skill set may be what most takes IT departments by surprise. Although some employees can be retrained effectively for the requirements of cloud—and cloud vendors are happy to train them on their products—David says many staffers are simply not suited for challenging cloud jobs. For both implementation and operation, new employees must either be hired or contracted for with a service provider.

A service provider may be an easy choice for the temporary role of implementations, but even operational staff can be difficult to hire. In smaller cities in the U.S., they may be difficult to find, while in larger tech centers such as Silicon Valley, Boston, or Washington, DC, they can be found but are very expensive. For those shops in markets where they are scarce, contracting with a service provider may be the way to go. Either way, the sticker shock of salary costs can confound companies that haven’t factored it into their business case.

Recommendations for “shadow IT”

WithSaaS, sales, marketing, HR or other departments can go around a slow IT department to bring the applications they need into an organization more quickly. But such side-door technology purchases can lead to breaches in legal, regulatory and security requirements. David advises departmental executives tempted to bring in their own SaaS solutions to follow these minimum rules:

Tell the IT department about what is being brought in, so security and compliance concerns, at least, can be addressed;

Work with the IT departments as well as possible; and

Don’t hide it!

How the smart IT departments learn

David believes that smart IT departments learn from shadow IT initiatives by learning the priorities, needs, preferences and preferred delivery for technology in line-of-business departments. Proactive IT executives are enabling their non-IT peers to continue to take the lead in such decisions, while also assuring that such purchases meet the security, compliance and integration requirements of the firm.

]]>Business and academia pointing fingers: who’s responsible for graduates’ readiness?http://gigaom.com/2013/06/29/business-and-academia-pointing-fingers-whos-responsible-for-graduates-readiness/
Sat, 29 Jun 2013 13:09:24 +0000http://pro.gigaom.com/?post_type=go_shortpost&p=182340There is a very strange dance going on between colleges and business, where employers rely quite heavily on a college degree as a basic requirement for hiring but believe that colleges are doing a bad job of preparing graduates for the workplace. But academic respond that they are teaching students to think, not to work.

Sine Nomine Associates, Mr. Boyes’s firm, works with high-tech companies like Cisco and IBM. However, it’s fundamental abilities that he says recent graduates lack, like how to analyze large amounts of data or construct a cogent argument. “It’s not a matter of technical skill,” he says, “but of knowing how to think.”

Mr. Boyes, who takes on one or two new employees a year, isn’t alone in finding recent graduates weak in those areas. While fresh hires had the right technical know-how for the job, said most employers in the survey, they grumbled that colleges weren’t adequately preparing students in written and oral communication, decision-making, and analytical and research skills.

That might come as a surprise to college leaders, who frequently cast the value of a degree in those very terms. But Julian L. Alssid, of the nonprofit Workforce Strategy Center, says that although business and higher education may use the same language, it doesn’t always have the same meaning. Educators often think of such competencies “in a purely academic context,” Mr. Alssid says, while employers want “book smarts to translate to the real world.”

“It’s a matter of how to apply that knowledge,” he says.

Such a push, however, tends not to go over well with faculty members who look down on any instruction perceived as vocational.

The Boeing Company in 2008 began to rank colleges based on how well their graduates perform within the corporation; it plans to conduct the same evaluation again this year, says Richard D. Stephens, senior vice president for human resources and management.

“To expect business to bring graduates up to speed,” Richard D. Stevens, senior vice president for Boeing human resources and management, says, “that’s too much to ask.”While the results have not been made public, Boeing did share them with colleges. Some took the findings seriously, even working with the aerospace company to refine their curricula, while others dismissed them. Colleges’ responses, Mr. Stephens says, have affected where Boeing focuses its internship programs and hiring.

“To expect business to bring graduates up to speed,” he says, “that’s too much to ask.”

With many people now moving from job to job and employer to employer throughout their careers, on-the-job preparation no longer makes economic sense to a lot of companies. Mr. Boyes, the technology consultant, puts all new hires through a yearlong training program, but he’s an outlier.

“Once upon a time, ‘trainee’ used to be a common job title,” says Philip D. Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University. “Now companies expect everyone, recent graduates included, to be ready to go on Day One.

“The mantle of preparing the work force,” he says, “has been passed to higher ed.”

Whether colleges want to accept that responsibility is another matter. While some institutions tout their career centers, internship offerings, and academic programs designed with industry input, others argue that workplace skills ought to be taught on the job. Higher education is meant to educate broadly, not train narrowly, they say: It’s business that’s asking too much.

So, who is responsible for training graduates in the skills needed in the office?

Boeing seems to think that colleges and universities are part of their supply chain, and that they should be providing cogs that will fit the corporate gearbox, without any tooling by the business at all.

Historically, however, American business spent a great deal of effort training new hires. This was partly due to the companies desires to train people to do things the ‘company way’ but also as a practical response to the inexperience of candidates. How would a new high school or college graduate have had access to the tools available on the factory floor? Or exposure to logistics at railways or ports? Or practical experience in erecting skyscrapers or bridges?

But we have moved into a different era, where much of the work being performed in business relies on the coordination of human thinking, mediated by computers, software, and the web. Yes, we still have factories, and we are building bridges, but the proportion of jobs involved in those sectors have dwindled dramatically. in 2005, a milestone was reached, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, with more than 50% of jobs in the US becoming non-routine and cognitive, shifting from 40% of jobs in 1975 to around 60% today (as I discussed in Work is rapidly becoming nonroutine).

My argument is this:

Historically, company training programs focused on the routinization of work: teaching trainees how to work as bank tellers, clerks, or assembly line workers. It was intended to teach manual skills, and the application of thinking done by others.

Since the ’70s, company training programs have dramatically decreased, as a function of cost cutting initiatives and a growing sense that companies weren’t getting back a return on the investment made. People were changing jobs too quickly for the benefits of anything but the most basic of training to be felt.

At any rate, what is needed is a completely different set of skills, cognitive and improvisational skills needed in the vastly different work context of 2013.

I’ve argued elsewhere (see Hireart is another placeform interceding in the broken labor market) that we need actor to fill the gap in America’s broken labor market. The traditional actors — business, academia, and government — are involved in a Mexican standoff, pointing their fingers at each other, and taking no responsibility for fixing the problem. Government has slid so far out of the picture that it goes unmentioned in Fischer’s article, except implicitly, as an underwriter of funding for community colleges and so forth.

Here’s a way to look at it. In a well-organized world we’d have some coordination between government, business, and academia. Imagine a recent graduate and job candidate, Bette, looking for a job applying her degree in Spanish Literature (with a minor in Chemistry). Her factual knowledge — the principles of chemistry, American History, and Spanish — has been provided by her college, and application of that factual knowledge in the business context — making better rubber gaskets for Latin American markets, perhaps — would be the province of her hypothetical employer. However, several companies where she’s interviewed think she doesn’t have enough business experience, and that she lacks needed financial skills, like understanding cash flow and currency fluctuations. The federal, state, and local governments have no programs to school Bette — and the many other recent graduates — and she opted to work part-time during college, especially during the summers, to pay for part of her college expenses rather than taking on an unpaid internship. However, she still has over $20,000 in student debt.

The picture looks like this:

The relations here have been boiled down to the most basic economic ones, which is a vast oversimplification. While at college, Bette also built a network of friends and colleagues at the Gap, where she worked as a retail clerk. But her network does not overlap much with the working world at the sort of companies that might want to hypothetically take advantage of her skills in Spanish and chemistry. And none of the three players wants to take responsibility, after Bette has graduated, for the additional training, networking, or outreach that might be necessary for Bette to connect with a job.

A Modest Proposal

I think we have to wind this back and imagine how it might be if there was a fourth actor in the picture from the start of Bette’s time in college, one organized for the purpose of avoiding the vacuum that Bette and millions of other graduates fall into.

A placeform is a for profit enterprise that creates and mediates a marketplace using a software platform, and leveraging scale on all sides of the market in ways that the other actors may not have the capacity to do.I have been using the idea of placeforms (marketplace + platform = placeform) for the past few months, and I propose that this is the answer, and perhaps the only possible answer to this problem. A placeform is a for profit enterprise that creates and mediates a marketplace using a software platform, and leveraging scale on all sides of the market in ways that the other actors may not have the capacity to do. (In essence, they are undertaking what a more benevolent government might do, but which ours cannot, fo a complex series of political reasons.)

Let’s describe an imaginary placeform — BeLabor.org — that was started by a group of recent college graduates with some initial seed funding (from Linkedin founders) and grants from government programs. Imagine this happened 10 years ago, 5 years before before Bette started college, and she was one of the fifth year group of college freshman to be involved in the project.

How is this scenario different for Bette?

While Bette might still have studied Spanish literature, her BeLabor advisor, Carla, would have set up a mentorship with a local Spanish-speaking business woman of Gautemalan background, to help Bette learn more about the local, Latino business community, and perhaps to find practical opportunities to apply her language skills. That led to a job in a local Spanish newspaper in her junior and senior years, instead of the Gap job she started with, and led her to consider adding some accounting courses.

BeLabor provided Bette with a great deal of information about the job market, and BeLabor’s online network (designed along the lines of Angellist and Linkedin) allowed Bette to follow recommended companies — those that matched her interests, skills, and personal values — and for those companies to follow her, as well. This connected here with dozens of contacts within those companies, some of which became initial points of contact in her job search.

BeLabor applied psychodynamic characterization of corporate culture and Bette’s psychological orientation to help identify ‘best fit’ recommendations for her and participating companies.

BeLabor worked with Bette and companies that expressed initial interest in her, and starting in her junior year, BeLabor suggested specific online courses and seminars that Bette should take, to better meet the needs of potential employers.

Bette scored very high in certain tests, leading BeLabor to offer her a full-time summer internship in her junior year, counseling high school students preparing for college and considering BeLabor relative to competitive placeforms.

How can BeLabor pay for this?

BeLabor charges companies a 15% finder’s fee (based on first 12 months salary) for placing a candidate. This is in line with industry norms for headhunting, and is a small price for avoiding the costs of mishires.

BeLabor charges the successfully placed candidates a 5% fee (at the end of the first 12 months of employment), but candidates can opt to provide counseling and advice in lieu of payment, if BeLabor agrees. Their is also an option to contribute time to charitable work in lieu of payment as well. Successfully placed candidates can also opt to continue to rely on BeLabor as an agent for a fee — like a sport’s or entertainment agent — to negotiate on Bette’s behalf for pay raises, promotions, and assignments. (I discussed this idea in Freelancers need agents like companies need head hunters.)

Belabor — after its initial few years of operation — became a private student loan division. Because of its involvement with students, BeLabor was able to decrease the cost of loans for those in good standing.

BeLabor works with colleges and universities, many of whom have outsourced their student placement and related services to the company, reducing expenses for the institutions while opening a very profitable business for BeLabor.

BeLabor manages internship and new hire training programs on behalf of corporations who wish to outsource them, again, saving money for the company and a significant profit for BeLabor. BeLabor can leverage its skills in big data and the broad information it has on company culture and candidates psychological make-up to make better matches. It also handles the new (mythical at present, but coming soon) federal regulations on internship pay and reporting on behalf of the companies.

Well, you get the picture. Bette got a great job with Proctor & Gamble, based in Cincinnati, focused on business development in Latin America for health care products. She opted to advise youngsters in lieu of payment back to BeLabor, and fifteen years later — as a SVP at P&G — she was asked to join the board of BeLabor, which she did.

[I am aware that this scenario is not very well-represented in these diagrams, a failing I will rectify in a report I am planning for August on the topic of placeforms.]
]]>CEOs demands for increased performance cannot be met by today’s HRhttp://gigaom.com/2013/06/26/ceos-demands-for-increased-performance-cannot-be-met-by-todays-hr/
Wed, 26 Jun 2013 12:30:42 +0000http://pro.gigaom.com/?post_type=go_shortpost&p=182024Let’s leave aside the discussion of the global economy and its seemingly unending erosion of jobs. Companies — even those that are profitable — have cut staff to what may be beyond levels of sustainable performance. Nonetheless, executives globally are still looking to get an additional 20 percent performance improvement, according to new research from CEB reported by Thomas Handcock.

I believe the findings are correct and represent policy at many global firms, And I concur with Handcock’s response, as far as he goes. He argues that the key is to help employees become more effective at operating in a network (emphasis his):

Achieving this breakthrough performance is not a matter of increasing employee workloads. In fact, our data shows that the majority of employees have already reached the limit to their workloads. The answer lies in a critical reassessment of how work gets done and what good employee performance looks like.

Employees are operating in a new work environment characterized by increased complexity and inter-dependence. The idea of the “individual contributor” who works on a concrete set of tasks by themselves and whose work focused interaction is limited to reporting back to their manager is a thing of the past. In the modern knowledge-based enterprise, employees need to work with and through others to succeed. As a result, organizations must move beyond building the ability of employees to execute on their individual tasks and objectives, and instead focus on building employees’ network performance— their ability to contribute to the performance of those around them, and draw on the capabilities of their network to impact their own performance.

The unexamined problem is the company culture and organizational strictures. It is not enough to train workers to be more adept at instant messaging, Yammer, and social media, for example. But for more fundamental changes in social productivity, people have to be able to rethink the strictures of work. For example, Bette, a designer in a consulting company, AdjectiveNoun, may have discovered that Red Pen is a very small and simple app for sharing and commenting on designs (see “Red Pen is the simplest and smallest design review tool I’ve seen“). But if AdjectiveNoun’s policies deny her the ability to pick her own tools (bring your own brain) or if other members of the design team drag their feet because they don’t want to experiment with new tools, then Bette’s efforts to increase her own productivity, and potentially the network productivity of the groups and the company too are limited.

Other innovations could be blocked too at a structural level. Handcock is too quick to look at the individual and not the company as an organization with its own culture. As I discuss in “Cultural change is really complex contagion,” there are serious barriers to adopting behaviors that might be considered risky:

“New behaviors are hard to spread when the following conditions hold:

Workers have few trusted and close company friends

The new behaviors being advocated are unfamiliar, risky, or contrary to the current status quo

Very few employees have adopted the new behaviors.”

So if Bette attempts to change the way that meetings are conducted — trying to move to a more lean discipline, with less large group meetings and more direct one-to-one coworking — she could encounter serious pushback.

My recommendation to companies is to avoid the top-down, HR-led approaches to training employees on how to be more productive in the new fast-and-loose, postnormal economy we have moved into. Instead, the new HR has to be fast and loose itself if it is to be effective. What does that mean? A fast-and-loose approach to HR must include these characteristics:

The new HR must relax the tight connection model and adopt looser connections with everyone. That translates into letting people figure out how to train themselves and how to do their own jobs better.

Instead of analyzing work in an abstract way and trying to optimize it in the general, find the people who are most advanced in adopting the new behaviors leading to greater network productivity. These “positive deviants” are the ones best suited to serve as role models for others (see “How ‘positive deviants’ help a culture change itself“), and HR should work with them to get their take on how best to get others to understand the new behaviors.

HR should work to change the cultural barriers to people creating more connections in the company, both loose and strong connections. Is hanging around in the cafeteria talking with others treated as a necessary aspect of work, or is it considered goofing off?

Instead of putting up inspirational posters, HR should work to break down barriers to work experimentation in practices, tools, and social relationships.

In a world that is changing at a dizzying rate and in unpredictable ways, HR needs to work toward a business culture that is more improvisational, where people realize that participating in spontaneous projects improves how work gets done and are rewarded for their participation, and to potentially shift to a new approach and leave the old way behind.

And the biggest barrier to innovation in the workplace might be management. DDIworld published a study that suggests there is an enormous disconnect between management and workers about innovation. Seventy-eight percent of managers thought they demonstrated openness and appreciation for unique ideas and opinions, while 43 percent of workers agreed. What about helping workers learn from mistakes? Seventy-seven percent versus 51 percent. Enabling employees to learn more about business trends and emerging issues? Seventy-seven percent versus 51 percent.

Until this gap is closed — and not by better propaganda or coercion — there is little chance that we’ll find that 20 percent boost. My suggestion is to fragment management and dilute the idea of direct reporting into five or six looser relationships. I’ll leave that for another post. But it’s clear that something dramatic has to change, because management is inherently blocking the growth of networked productivity by slowing or blocking innovation.

]]>Sara Sutton Fell answers questions on mid-career internshipshttp://gigaom.com/2013/06/05/sara-sutton-fell-answers-questions-on-mid-career-internships/
Wed, 05 Jun 2013 16:59:45 +0000http://pro.gigaom.com/?post_type=go_shortpost&p=178925Sara Sutton Fell is the CEO of FlexJobs, a leading site for finding a job that offers some type of flexibility, including telecommuting positions, flex/part-time hours, freelance, etc. FlexJobs was recently named a Top Career Site by Forbes and is the official job board for Working Mother. I recently exchange emails with Sara, after reading about the site.

(via email)

Stowe Boyd: I am interested in learning more about your thoughts in mid-career internships. I’ve read a few articles but wonder if there are organizations or web sites that could make it more accessible to people. And of course, the hurdles involved in finding meaningful mid-career internships.

Sara Sutton Fells: Most internship sites are geared towards college students or recent graduates, so it can be tough to find the more professional opportunities that don’t require you to be a matriculating student or recent grad. Having said that, ANY internship is a foot in the door and an opportunity to learn new skills and to prove yourself, so using sites like internships.com are certainly an option, and focusing on the jobs that are for “recent grads” and asking (or even just applying) to find out if they’ll consider not-so-recent grads. I would also recommend people check out FlexJobs’ Internships category as well. For example:

Development Intern with the National Multiple Sclerosis Society

Pharmacy Intern with Tufts Medical Center

Family Resource Coordinator with Second Harvest Heartland

One main strategy I recommend though (which is in the same ballpark with mid-career internships) is volunteering or working with nonprofits. Since nonprofits are often looking for skilled volunteers, it’s a great way to keep your resume active, network, and possibly rise within the organization or your field (especially if you’re looking for a way to get experience to help you with a career change). Nonprofit and Philanthropy jobs are very popular on our site, and cover hundreds of different types of job titles. I would recommend idealist.org and our Top 100 Companies for Nonprofit Jobs as resources.

SB: A second question: what about the legal side of unpaid internships?

SSF: Well, it’s much more restrictive than people might think. There is a set of guidelines set out by the US Dept of Labor for Internship Programs that falls under the Fair Labor Standards Act which has strict criteria about internship programs in the private sector. For example, the internship is “for the benefit of the intern” rather than the company, and they even state that the company “derives no immediate advantage” from the intern’s activities to the point that “on occasion its operations may actually be impeded.” So internships are really for training purposes, which is why they are geared mainly towards college students and recent graduates, to supplement or complement their educational process.

SSF: I’m a big believer that the perception of a straight career path (aka “climbing the ladder”) is damaging for most people. The simple fact is that it doesn’t happen that way anymore for most people, and the expectation that it should causes self-doubt, disillusion, and a ridiculous amount of non-productive pressure. Instead there are sidesteps, steps backwards, and occasionally leaps forward. So I believe that the mid-career internships are a possible way to expand your professional path and learn new skills. You get your foot in the door with a company and are theretofore considered an “internal hire” if a job does become available, and you meet and connect with colleagues to grow your professional network.

Sara’s thoughts on more flexible work situations are certainly in line with what I think the market needs, but may run aground the polarization that animates a lot of the discussion around remote work (see The polarization around remote work comes as no surprise), perhaps one of the most divisive issues today in the workplace.

]]>Bosses as teachers, innovators, and terrorshttp://gigaom.com/2013/02/11/bosses-as-teachers-innovators-and-terrors/
Mon, 11 Feb 2013 16:34:32 +0000http://pro.gigaom.com/?post_type=go_shortpost&p=169144This past week had me uncovering a long thread of research — unplanned actually — that confirm the central and powerful role of bosses in the workplace. Setting that context, in one post (In a social world, management’s new role is teaching social literacy) I quoted from The Value Of Bosses (Edward Lazear et al):

A boss’s primary activity is teaching skills that persist.

This is a statement of subversive optimism, it seems to me. The researchers’ work quantified the impact of good bosses as being roughly equivalent to adding an additional team member to a nine member team, and that impact is stronger with better workers, presumably because the better workers are more open to learning.

In an increasingly social world, where digital literacy must include the skills of using social tools, we will therefore need to have managers that can teach social literacy.

And we have to stop pretending that knowing how to login to Facebook is social literacy, as Ana Silva points out.

The dark side of the power of bosses is fear. Employees are working longer hours and harder because they are fearful for their jobs (Productivity demand up despite us working longer), and productivity demands are increasing. Senior managers believe that an additional 20% of productivity is needed, according to a CEB study, and this must come from increased collaboration: from greater social literacy.

So, we need to start by making sure managers across the board become extremely socially literate, and knowledgeable in teaching social literacy as well. My experience to date suggests this is not the case in business today, and is unlikely to be even a high priority in most companies, where training in social tools and technique is often the job of community managers or consultants, not line management.

And we will have to find new ways to innovate in our social experiments. So bosses and staff alike will have to achieve social literacy, enough so that social business innovations can be tried and evaluated. I suggested in Lean social means no paving the cowpaths that the principles of lean development and the lean startup should be applied to the adoption of social in business:

The principles:

Work fast

Minimize waste

Expose ideas to real people early and often

Test hypothesis

Iterate in response to feedback

Scale successes

First of all, I think this argues for social software that is naturally and explicitly organized around this lean principles. For example, social tools that explicitly support intuitive and fast techniques for disseminating new ideas and gathering feedback in useful and visual ways. (I selected that as an are where I think that today’s tools fall short.)

Secondly, I think this runs in conflict with the default model in most businesses today, the majority of which are still operating around the concept of fixed, well-defined business processes that people are supposed to ‘follow’ to get jobs done. But we’ve switched to a world of rapidly changing work, where work is becoming more collaborative, and solutions have to be contrived following general principles not exact formulas. Yes, the principles define a sort of meta process, but it is simply a general template for a modern sort of lean learning.

Last, moving to a lean mindset — at the corporate, department, project or individual level — means that adoption of social can’t be taking the existing way of doing things and simply gluing some social stuff on top. It can’t. If only because the way we do things is the biggest leverage in innovation, and social has to be about innovation first, and secondly about improving productivity and efficiency of existing ways of doing things.

I think companies should adopt a lean social approach, and this once again has to become the mantra of managers. They have to drive these innovations.

And the climate of fear in the business world, where companies are cutting staff and asking the rest to work harder and longer, is a serious issue. This often is manifested as fear of the boss, particularly fear of getting fired. And when people quit their job, they are actually quitting their boss, because the communication is bad and there is little trust.

One technique to counter that fearful communication is anonymous feedback to bosses. I reviewed a new specialized tool for exactly that use case called Tell Your Boss Anything, which is well-designed for its purpose, intuitive, and simple to use. And it counters the inherent fear of retaliation that surrounds negative feedback to a manager.

One CEO, Charlie Kim of NextJump, instituted a company policy intended to end the precarious fear of the workforce: the fear of getting fired. He adopted a ‘no fire’ policy, and it changed everything in his business:

Charlie Kim: Once you realize that you are entering into a lifelong relationship, hiring starts to look a lot more like adoption, or dating. Multiple interactions over some time are required before our team would get comfortable with a prospective hire. Every hiring manager started hiring more carefully, something I’d been advocating for but couldn’t make happen in every manager. Without further direction, they started treating hiring like adoption: once we take someone into our family, they’re here for life, when things don’t work, they’re responsible for training them, helping them.

Training also became much more comprehensive, touching subjects such as character, grit, and integrity in ways we had previously viewed as beyond the scope of company training.

Once again, the central role of training for leaders — teaching skills that persist — comes to the forefront, but the radical nature of going to ‘no fire’ is breathtaking.

And Kim discovered that removing the fear of being fired led to a surprising result: 0% turnover. Basically, people value the stress-free, playing-for-the-long-term environment of the new NextJump, and they aren’t lured away by companies offering more money. Money is less important than belonging.

On The Tool Front

I reviewed Mailbox, the highly anticipated email client that implements a very smart email ‘snooze’ model. I will be using it as my preferred client from now on. I looked at Brightpod, a small and simple work media tool, and it may well be the perfect minimum viable product in that space. And I profiled Crowdbase, a very smart social sharing solution — a sort of Pinboard or Pinterest for the workgroup — which I am actively using myself.

Michael Wolf commented on Twitter’s acquisition of Bluefin Labs — part of a rapid consolidation in the social TV market — and he thinks Twitter was after their patents and contacts in the advertising side of things. Wolf also wondered what will About.me become now that it is being sold back to the founders by AOL, but that direction is not at all clear at this point.